OOC: This is rather all over the place, but hopefully not as obscure as the previous segment.
I'd only welcome questions and criticism at this point.
IC:
Pestel P.I. said:
It proceeds from everything that has been said above that for the correct and positive Establishment of Boundaries one must follow the consideration that the Right of Nationality must predominate for those Peoples that can freely make use of autonomous political independence, while the right of convenience must predominate for those Peoples that cannot [due to their weakness and small size] make use of this autonomous political independence and so must necessarily be under the rule of some stronger State.
Historians, starting with contemporary observers and moving on into the future, would struggle to reach a consensus on the importance of the Alexandrist rebellion. For many, especially early on and especially outside of Russia, it was easy to downplay those events as either the final salvo of the revolution or a painful interlude between Pestel’s assumption of supreme power and the execution of his planned reforms. This denied the rebellion much individual importance, making it look like a doomed and failed attempt to turn back the clock of history that has only succeeded in slowing down and disrupting the inevitable. A somewhat different perspective was initially championed by Faddey Bulgarin, some other Western-minded intellectuals and the survivors of provincial and Moscow aristocracy: they regarded the rebellion as a great tragedy, a new peasant war on par with that of Pugachev, compounded by its bad timing – that it would start just as the new government started to address the grievances of the populace! It was viewed as a tragic inevitability that ravaged many of the core regions of Russia, and that may have become an even greater disaster if not for the decisive actions of Pestel and his supporters that managed to avert this catastrophe. This has been called the great victory of Europe over Asia, civilisation over barbarity and reason over superstition – a claim that the few European observers present tended to take with a grain of salt, especially when aware of the draconian measures used by republican generals to suppress the lingering rural dissent. Nevertheless, and for obvious reasons, a modified version of this view would come to predominate as the official, government viewpoint on the matter for much of the century. A third perspective, to emerge later, was more sympathetic to the rebels; while their ideology was misguided, their grievances were very real, while Pestel’s agrarian policy was still ultimately that of compromise – one that favoured the peasants a lot more than the liberalist program, but woefully inadequate from the standpoint of the rural poor. This view regarded the Alexandrist uprising as an organic part of the revolution that failed because society was not prepared for it, but that nonetheless can be considered a harbinger of future political and social radicalism in the Russian Republic.
Be that as it may, the end of the peasant rebellion also marked the end of the revolution. Pestel’s authority in the core areas of Russia, especially in the north, west and centre of European Russia, was secure, and his actions to protect law and order against rebellion granted him some measure of legitimacy and grudging support among the provincial elites. On the other hand, it’s worth recounting the negative consequences of the rebellion. The south, northern Caucasus, Siberia and the Far East remained very much unsettled, with banditry, diehard Cossack resistance, nomadic raids, agrarian dissent and sectarian subversion continuing to undermine the government’s authority. The entire length of the southern border was effectively in a lawless state, with everything the late Romanovs have done to bring them into order having disappeared with the dynasty. While none of the new pretenders have been able to amass any significant or long-lasting following, the new Alexandrist sects would go on to add to an already confusing hodgepodge of Spiritual Christian sects in the south, continuously subverting the government’s moralist and centralist initiatives. And back in St. Petersburg and other major cities, Pestel had succeeded in alienating everyone on his left, while also burning the bridge to reconciliation with the monarchists by defeating their uprising and expelling the Imperial Family to Tobolsk in Siberia. While the liberalists and some pragmatic conservatives and non-revolutionary liberals remained on his side, this did not bode well for the new Republic’s political pluralism. Then again, Pestel himself was never a huge fan of too great a plurality of opinions, and the conspiracies against him from far left and far right have only confirmed him in his prejudice.
The question of the Republic’s post-revolution political organisation has been repeatedly put off for the future since Pestel’s takeover. With the last obstacle to his overall control of Russia gone, the Provisional Supreme Ruler could no longer continue to dodge this question – even if his original plan called for the Provisional Supreme Government to retain power for ten or fifteen years, it was now clear that such a long period of indecision would be politically hazardous. Although he and a few of his close allies (not including his fellow quintumvirs) had taken the time to refine his older constitutional project, he proved willing to call together a constituent assembly in 1830, perhaps wishing to decrease the appearance of autocratic rule that he had so often been accused of, or perhaps simply making another concession to liberal opinion, similar to the one in which he did not simply have the Imperial Family killed. Despite the assembly being made up of delegates elected from different administrative units based on universal manhood suffrage, Pestel’s detractors would later claim that it was deeply flawed from the start – that far from all the people in the “troubled” or simply distant parts of Russia had a chance to vote; that illiterate peasants were often tricked or coerced by their landlords to elect them or their favoured candidates; and that Pestel made full use of his military to intimidate the delegates into toeing the line. Be it as it may, the assembly ended up accepting Pestel’s constitutional project with a few modifications.
A number of contentious provisions was involved. Trubetskoy and his allies would have preferred to see, if not a constitutional monarchy, then a federal, parliamentary republic. Pestel, however, insisted on a strong, unitary state with a strong executive branch. This did not run into many objections except from the western parts of Russia; intimidated or not, the delegates were also more used to central authority and were easily convinced as to its necessity when faced with numerous internal and external threats. There was no question of autonomy in Finland or the Baltic provinces, and both were to be brought in line with the political institutions in the rest of the Republic. The Cossack Hosts were granted some leeway in the territories they occupied, however – this was both a crucial concession, offered in addition to amnesty in order to make peace with the Cossacks still fighting against the central government from the periphery, and necessary in the light of the need to re-secure the southern frontier. They were allowed to retain their own democratically-elected (but strictly separated by the constitution) peacetime and wartime leaders, and to keep all their lands in common property. Universal manhood suffrage for the elections of regional parliaments and the supreme government was a matter of surprisingly little controversy – while many St. Petersburg republicans would have preferred to restrict it by wealth or literacy, the nation as a whole proved willing to support Pestel’s proposal (which some have taken to validate the view that the delegates, most of whom were of aristocratic origins, supported the provision because the provincial aristocracy believed that illiterate, poor peasants would be more easily coerced to support its interests in the new Republic). The one concession to the liberals’ qualms was that literacy was still required to hold public office.
Despite Pestel’s continued efforts to shore up the Russian Orthodox Church as a national church of the Republic, no confessional requirement was added for holding public office – not solely a self-serving measure, as even after the Revolution Pestel was far from the only Lutheran in Russia’s political class. The Jews and Old Believers, now freed from most of their previous restrictions, could hypothetically take part in public life too, but ones that did so with any measure of success were, for now, far and few in between. In any case, far from all of them greeted the Republic with enthusiasm, considering that the other side of the coin involved forceful Russification measures and attempts to dismantle their preexisting communal institutions and judicial autonomy. Then again, among the Jews there was a fair amount of people who chafed at both the restrictions they faced under the Tsars and the predominance of a few wealthy individuals in aforesaid traditional institutions; to them, the reforms were a welcome break, though one that would only start fully paying off later. Similar restlessness and ambivalence could be found in Finland and the Baltic provinces, encouraged by the maimed landed elites that increasingly looked away from the Romanovs and towards Sweden and the German Confederation respectively.
With regards to the actual political institutions, both Pestel and his critics in the government were agreed on the need of a democratically-elected, representative parliament, but were less agreed on its precise form. Different projects of bicameralism were considered. In the end, it was decided to concentrate the legislative power in the hands of the
Narodnoye veche, which the foreigners took to calling either the People’s Parliament or the Veche, whose members would be elected for five years. Parallel to this, the
Sobor, sometimes mistranslated as the Senate, was to be elected for life and had the functions of Napoleon’s
Sénat conservateur, watching over the proper workings of the government and observance of the Constitution. Executive authority was to be vested in the Supreme Council –
Verkhovniy sovet, which was to be elected by the Veche for a five year term. However, in a change from his previous plans, the position of the chairman of the Council was vested in the
Perviy sovetnik or First Councillor, who was to retain this position for the entire five year term and who was in effect granted extensive powers, especially during war or in a state of emergency. This could not fail to draw criticism, which Pestel refrained from punishing. The Supreme Council itself was also expanded from five men to seven, which was seen as diluting the power of the other Councillors, but which also lent itself well to their specialisation as
de facto ministers or overseers of actual ministers, focusing on different spheres of governance.
Needless to say, when the elections (once again, marred by the disorder and communications breakdown in many parts of Russia) finally took place in 1831, the Veche was dominated by Pestel’s supporters or the undecideds who did not dare to resist them, and the Supreme Council was made up of his allies under his leadership. Kiselyov, Kankrin and Burtsev remained. Trubetskoy left the government, abandoning his hopes of influencing it towards his views for the nonce. He was replaced by Turgenev, Glinka and Aleksandr Sergeyevich Griboyedov, the latter having been charged with rebuilding the diplomatic corps – perhaps the most badly-damaged part of the Imperial state machine after the turmoil of the previous years, given its ties to the court and to the foreign aristocracy. Despite the previous successes, including the one that won him this position, Griboyedov was to have his hands full.
The 1820s proved to be an unexpectedly and disappointingly exciting period of time in Europe. Certainly it was not as eventful as the Napoleonic Era, despite some initial fears – but it was still enough to shake up the balance of power in a way that, though it may have seemed relatively subtle on the map, nonetheless had some serious implications for the future. A new wave of liberalism and nationalism swept through Europe, causing spontaneous and uncoordinated conflagrations of political violence in different corners of the continent. Uncoordinated they may have been, but neither the revolutionaries nor the champions of order saw them as wholly unconnected. One uprising inspired another, and generally was able to secure the sympathy if not the outright support of like-minded dissidents in other kingdoms. Likewise, although different combinations of carrot and stick methods had been applied by different European governments at first, the Holy Alliance, championed by Metternich and Alexander I, had consistently striven to fight against the revolutionary tendencies on a continental level, coordinating their actions and staging interventions against uprisings that seemed likely to prevail. From the start, this policy faced opposition from the United Kingdom. Increasingly more lenient at home, the British were also rather unsympathetic towards the continental Great Powers and their reactionary policies, helping thwart Spain’s attempts to regain control over its New World colonies and also consistently opposing interventions back in Europe.
The greatest failure of the Holy Alliance’s policies before 1826 was in Greece. The Greek uprising against the Ottoman Empire that started in 1821 and then dragged on for just under a decade was definitely an example of revolutionary activity and was poorly received by all the important governments in Europe – even, initially, that of the United Kingdom. But it put the Great Powers in an awkward position. Greece was remote, and its geography would’ve made the rebels hard to suppress. What’s more, between pan-Christian sympathy and Philhellenism, the Greek cause inspired a great deal of sympathy among the European public. If anything, of course, it made the uprising all the more dangerous – the volunteers and backers that rushed to the rebels’ assistance were bound to spread a bad example and encourage similar rebellions elsewhere, especially in Italy and Russia. But it also made both intervention and simple inaction similarly risky, as it pitted the governments directly against what increasingly seemed like a popular and heroic cause. And then there was the British factor – after the early concerns about the integrity of the Ottoman Empire had subsided, Canning, the new Foreign Secretary, began to vocally and proactively support the Greeks, pushing for the Great Powers to act in concert to force the Ottoman Empire to let go of the province – an increasingly plausible possibility in their state of indecision, despite Metternich’s opposition and Alexander’s reluctance.
All those calculations were overturned by the Russian Revolution of 1826. While at first it seemed to be a greater blow to Metternich, the wily Austrian chancellor soon managed to recover from it, as described before – this was done by strengthening his bonds with France and Prussia, and focusing on preserving the monarchic order west of the Russian and Turkish borders. British foreign policy, meanwhile, was in shambles – unwilling to approach the radical Russian republicans, outplayed by Metternich elsewhere in Europe and increasingly troubled by the death of many of its key members, the Tory government had lost all influence it may have had over the situation on the mainland, only starting to recover its footing after 1828 when reformed under the Duke of Wellington. This applied not only to Greece – now thrown to the wolves – but also to Poland’s March Republic, whose moderate leaders had hoped to secure British backing and mediation. Things had in fact worked out very well for Metternich – with Britain paralyzed and Russia too distracted by internal turmoil, his bid to focus on suppressing Poland and dissent in the remaining Holy Alliance countries had apparently payed off, while the Greek insurgents were slowly but surely being pounded into oblivion by the Turkish and Egyptian forces, effectively taking care of the problem as far as he was concerned. While later blasted as short-sighted, the draconian new laws introduced in France had helped the Ultras maintain control – despite some very precarious moments during 1828 and 1829 when a series of uprisings had to be suppressed in Paris, Lyon and other major French cities. French forces also played a key part in suppressing rebellions in Italy and Belgium. In Germany, which also faced a lesser wave of dissent throughout this time (partly inspired by sympathy towards the Poles), Metternich had judged it more prudent to use Austrian forces against the uprisings.
Defeating Poland while the international situation remained favourable nonetheless remained a chief priority for the Holy Alliance. While the March Republic managed to muster a surprising amount of martial competence under Michał Gedeon Radziwiłł, having both a fairly experienced regular army and a large patriotic militia, the military outcome of the campaign was never truly in doubt after the failure of Adam Jerzy Czartoryski’s diplomatic offensive. With much of the Austrian forces tied up keeping the peace in the German Confederation, Prussia took the lead in attacking the March Republic in the spring of 1827. Under the command of Gneiseneu and Clausewitz, the Prussians managed to push through towards Warsaw despite stiff resistance, scoring a number of close-ran victories against the Poles, but failing to rout their army. The Austrians struck from the south later in the same year, with rather less success, but still accomplishing Metternich’s immediate goal of preventing an uprising in Galicia and securing Krakow (up to then a free city). In 1828, Czartoryski made one more bid for peace, trying to persuade the Austrians to let Poland survive as a free kingdom, perhaps under a Wettin or a Hapsburg. While the damaging partisan activities behind their lines may have made this offer tempting to the German commanders, Metternich rejected it out of hand (and neither Francis I nor Frederick William III saw any merit in disagreeing). After all, even an autonomous Poland under the Russian Empire proved very easily subverted by rebellious nationalists – and an independent Poland, no matter how dependable its government, would also inspire nationalist sentiment in Prussia’s and Austria’s own Polish territories.
This may have been a moot point anyway, as Czartoryski and Radziwiłł were increasingly forced to give in to radical pressure lest they be overthrown and their rebellion collapse into factionalism, as had happened in Greece. A series of concessions culminating in formal recognition for some of the more politically unsavoury partisan and militia commanders and the promise of abolition of serfdom at once prolonged the rebellion and sealed its fate, burning whatever bridges may have still existed. While peasants and the urban poor now fought with for the Republic with renewed enthusiasm, the more conservative-minded aristocrats increasingly started to defect and support the invaders. The fighting continued throughout 1828, and despite some success in starting an uprising back in Prussia, the Poles soon suffered a decisive defeat at Błonie, followed by a costly, but ultimately successful Austro-Prussian assault on Warsaw in September. While the civil government surrendered at this point, accepting exile or retirement somewhere far from Poland, the military and the radicals made an effort to fight on from Bialystok, seized from the Russian chaos at the beginning of the revolt. Antoni Jabłonowski actually had his day in the sun, forming a new, more radical government there. Ultimately, though, it was all for naught – Poland was not nearly as frustrating to fight in as Greece, the armies fighting against it were a good deal more organised, and the spirit of centralised resistance had been broken with the fall of Warsaw. By 1829, Poland was occupied, even as rebellions continued to rage behind the lines. It was soon decided to redivide it along the lines of the Third Partition of Poland, except for Prussia gaining more of the territory between the Vistula and the Bug, granting Austria a smoother northern border and fewer Poles to worry about. The cholera epidemic that spread in from Russia next year effectively dealt the killing blow to this decentralised resistance, although it took its terrible toll on the invading forces and their homelands as well.
In the meantime, the Greek rebellion was also starting to wind down. As official Western assistance failed to materialise and the unofficial help began to run out of steam (and into trouble with their own authorities courtesy of Metternich), the scattered Greek forces were put decisively on the defensive. Despite the Turks bearing down on them from the north and the Egyptians landing on the Peloponnesian peninsula, the rebels actually performed exceedingly well in delaying their advance on the land, making their enemies pay in blood for every valley they retook. Nonetheless, the rebellion’s cohesion was pretty much gone by 1828; between the fall of Athens and Missolonghi and the complete naval superiority of the Egyptian fleet, the Greeks were reduced to a few pockets of fierce, but isolated resistance that were to be systematically reduced over the next several months. And, of course, the Ottomans and the Egyptians were by this point only too happy to carry out bloody reprisals, often to the extent of localised ethnic cleansing.
It was only in 1829 that the Greeks were unexpectedly saved from what may well have been their extermination as a people in their native land. Their true saviour was a partial shift in political conjecture; it was personified, however, by rather unlikely and reluctant mortal statesmen. While Wellington and his government were, by basic inclination, a good deal more leery of supporting radicals and rebels than their predecessors, they were also operating in a somewhat less paranoid political climate. For all the distaste that they still felt towards the Russian Republic, they could not help but see that Pestel was neither a Robespierre nor a Napoleon – at least, not yet. In fact, he seemed like someone they could deal with, rather like Latin American republican leaders. The parallel was if anything only strengthened by the fact that a formal recognition of the new Russian government both frustrated the Holy Alliance (while also allaying fears of diplomatic isolation on the continent) and served Britain’s economic interests. Indeed, while the volume of Russian-British trade fell considerably since the beginning of political turmoil in Russia, further shifting the United Kingdom’s commercial priorities towards the New World, the significance of the trade remained high – especially given the need for the two economies to recover, Russia’s from civil war and Britain’s from financial crisis. It was here that Griboyedov, returning to his diplomatic career under a new regime, was first able to shine – working out an agreement through intermediaries for Britain to recognise Pestel’s government and sign a trade agreement, helping normalise the relations between the two and granting Britain most favoured nation status in the Republic. Metternich was obviously none too pleased by Russia gaining official recognition from one of the Great Powers, but what worried him even more was what the treaty left unsaid. Even though openly collaborating with a Republic to thwart Austria was a bit too much for Wellington, the creation of a certain London-St. Petersburg axis allowed the two great outsiders of European politics to team up to apply pressure on the Ottoman Empire. British public opinion, after all, still demanded some kind of action to support the Greeks – while its governing classes found that in the face of Russia’s weakness and the Ottoman Empire’s apparent revitalisation, supporting the latter was no longer anywhere near as obvious a policy, especially in the light of Austria’s growing influence in Constantinople.
Seeing the phantom of Canning return to imperil peace in South-Eastern Europe once more, Metternich realised that swift and audacious action was necessary. As the British resumed making threatening noises, Metternich called together a new conference in Zagreb (obviously the Russians were not invited, while an Ottoman representative was, though not as a proper member of the conference) and surprised everyone by pledging himself to the cause of – not the liberation of Greece, but the end of bloodshed in the Balkans. Feeling betrayed by this rather equivocal statement, but nonetheless unwilling to risk a confrontation with both Austria and Britain, the Ottomans accepted Metternich’s mediation. Greece received autonomy along Serbian lines in a relatively small territory south of Thessaly, under the leadership of Theodoros Kolokotronis, one of the last unbowed Greek commanders. Crete and Cyprus passed to Muhammed Ali of Egypt, as per the previous agreement. Also, Wallachia and Moldavia received certain assurances of resumed autonomy, effectively passing under a joint Austro-Turkish protectorate, the local
divans/i] being allowed to elect rulers from among their native nobility, replacing the Phanariot rule of the previous century. It was undoubtedly very awkward for Metternich (or, to a lesser extent, Emperor Francis) to pose as a defender of Balkan Christians, even more so considering that they were overwhelmingly Orthodox and quite rebellious. But the alternative was worse – the unholy alliance of Church and Republic in Russia seemed bound to inspire revolutionary sentiment in Turkey-in-Europe. As indeed it had – but Metternich’s hope was that this tendency could at least be somewhat deflated by Austrian diplomacy actively striving to defuse conflicts, supporting the Ottoman Empire as such while also keeping it from provoking a general rebellion.
It is unclear whether Mahmud II was feeling very grateful about Metternich’s intervention, even though in the end it did seem to benefit the Ottomans. Indeed, even though he was forced to back down from crushing the rebels entirely, the Sultan was still left in what at first appeared to be a far improved position at the end of the 1820s. The Greek rebellion was effectively defeated, having only won symbolic concessions and a devastated country. Even more importantly, the Russian threat that hanged like the Sword of Damocles since Catherine’s time was at least temporarily neutralised. This freed the Sultan up to carry out extensive reforms. Back in 1826, when the revolution in Russia was only just beginning, Mahmud II had crushed the Janissary Corps – perhaps, some speculate, alarmed by how easily the Imperial Guard ended up trying to play kingmaker in the Ottoman Empire’s northern neighbour. He suppressed the provincial Janissary uprisings and crushed the autonomy and privileges of most regional elites, culminating in the abolition of the timar system of land-holding throughout the Empire in 1830. In its place, a new, more modern and loyal army was created – with assistance from Prussia, Austria and France, which provided it with weapons, advisors and training. After this reform was completed, it seemed that Turkey was very much on the rebound, despite the lingering unrest in the Balkans and the growing hostility of Britain.
However, Mahmud II was all too aware of a different and in his mind much more critical threat developing at the south of his empire. Muhammed Ali, the governor and self-declared Khedive (viceroy) of Egypt, was a loyal subject in name, but an ambitious independent ruler in deed. Much like Mahmud, Muhammed Ali was also keen on modernising his corner of the Ottoman Empire and crushing the entrenched opposition of the old elite; unlike Mahmud, Muhammed Ali had a significant head start. At the cost of high taxation and conscription of the population for public works, industrial projects and military adventures, Muhammed Ali transformed Egypt into a prominent regional power in its own right, not held back by internal weaknesses and actively expanding outwards. Not only was the Sublime Porte powerless to bring him to heel, but it was forced to rely on his assistance upon running into trouble with the Greeks. Despite taking many casualties, the Egyptians walked away from the Greek campaign victorious, claiming Crete and Cyprus as their trophies. The alliance between Constantinople and Cairo almost immediately began to deteriorate after this. Muhammed Ali worked to expand his influence into Greater Syria, subverting Ottoman authority in the region in the process. In the meantime, the Ottomans, alarmed by their supposed vassal’s powerful fleet, began an effort to modernise and build up their own navy under French supervision. This led to an arms race between the two, with Egypt being increasingly supported by Britain even as the Holy Alliance backed the Turks. This was a profound change from their earlier attitude towards the Albanian upstart; though it should be noted that their earlier antagonism did not disappear overnight, the British being particularly displeased by the Khedive’s economical protectionism and the Khedive in turn being wary of their efforts to subvert his rule.
